I first saw Jonathan Haidt in a TED talk back in 2009 or so talking about the moral differences between liberals and conservatives in terms of psychological differences. There does seem to be psychological and biological influence on people's political views as there is a consistent left-right divide in democracies throughout the world which usually make up the majority of the electorate. This was enlightening to me as the media often portrays the left right divide at best as a contest of ideas or at worst crass self-interest. That people may decide political views based on personality put things in perspective for me, and has given me a basic sort of humility towards those with different views who may be unaware of why they feel a certain way about things and aren't just bad people. It also means we ought to have an honest dialogue with others who may be predisposed to ideas which aren't in their interest and seek not to change their mindset but the conclusions they are motivated to reach.
As sensible as this view of morality and politics is to me, academia has taken a while to get there. Haidt has helped to revolutionize this moral psychology for the twenty first century, especially for a popular audience. Haidt in collaboration with professors and grad students of UVA, UCI, and USC runs the website YourMorals where you can take a quiz to gauge your own moral psychology, and further their research.
Haidt entered college in 1987 and became a professor at UVA in 1995. When Haidt started college, the reigning view of moral psychology was that morality was developed through reasoning with others on the universal foundations of care and harm. Jean Piaget came up with his famous theory of mental development, in which children self construct morality with other children linked to their understanding of the physical world. We have an egotistical understanding of the world early in life and learn empathy just as we learn object permanency, that things exist behind our perception of them. Lawrence Kohlberg came up with three stages of morality: preconventional, conventional, and postconventional. Before social conventions we act egotistically expecting others to provide for us, then we learn dependency on others and we take moral rules to be obedience to rules which is a sort of realism, and then we reach postconventional morality which is based on norms independent of the arbitrary commands of others. A student of Kohlberg Elliot Turiel argued that the values of harm and fairness were universals from which all moral rules were ultimately based on. These foundations were opposed to social convention and authority from earlier stages of mental development.
All of this fitted in nicely with the left-liberal worldview, confirming western notions of how humans think, and so dominated academia from the 70s to the 90s when Haidt came along. The cracks in this idealistic paradigm came Richard Schweder, a cultural anthropologist and advisor to Haidt who did some work in India. What he discovered was that in a non western culture like India there wasn't a clear dividing line between social convention and what is fair or harmful. He used a method of Turiel's, telling stories about individuals who break social rules and asked yes or no questions as to whether the behavior was justified. What Schweder did differently was to tell stories about behaviors not linked to harm and fairness. The results were that Americans thought the acts were permissible, and the Indians thought they weren't. The conclusion: "the moral order is a social order" given the difference between western and non western notions of the relation of individuals to society. Individualistic culture which the liberal view assumes has a clear diving line between social convention and harm/fairness while sociocentric cultures do not.
Turiel himself wrote a rebuttal essay claiming that the stories just had different meanings to different people but the underlying reasoning was the same. Something like disgust and disrespect are aspects of harm, as is adhering to social rules there respect is to fairness. Of course the question comes up whether there can be a case of morality not based on fair or harm which can actually falsify the theory. But research from other non western societies like Brazil bears important differences in what people think is socially acceptable, which can be very different from harm and fairness. So Shweder was on to something.
Further evidence against the reigning paradigm came from cognitive psychology. When asked why something non harmful like eating dogs or being a satanist is wrong, people rationalize their answers in favor of their preferences and not the other way around. People's preferences are formed by unconscious reactions to uncomfortable or ambiguous stimuli which is hardwired in the brain. The almond shaped amygdala supercharges the emotions of the limbic system, linked to hormones, to make quick judgements before the rational cortex has time to make a decision.
Political psychologists John Jost and Arie Kruglanski have proposed that the personality trait of openness predicts liberal and conservative attitudes. Conservatives are more likely to view unfamiliar or ambiguous behavior as threatening than liberals which confounds the line between social order and moral order. This is the subject of The Republican Brain by Chris Mooney that came out the same year as Haidt's book, and is an excellent compliment.
The philosophers preceded the cognitive psychologists and so their views still set the debate today. A very influential view has been that reason is separate from emotional functioning, which has its adherents from Plato to Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson's metaphor was that of the two consuls of the Roman Republic who shared duties domestically and outside the country.
This view has been undercut by neuroscientists like Antonio Damasio who point toward two pieces of evidence. 1) brain damage to the prefrontal cortex affects emotional functioning. This was demonstrated by railroad worker Phineas Gage in the 19th century who was struck by a railroad spike in his left frontal cortex. He survived with his memory and intelligence intact but his behavior radically changed. He became more impulse and obstinate to the point where he was fired. 2) Split brain operations reveal how stimuli from one half affects the operation of the other half. The left half of the brain is involved in language and abstract reasoning and the right half is involved in spatial and recognition tasks. If a word is flashed to the left eye (controlled by the right hemisphere) the right side of the body (controlled by the left hemisphere) can act without any conscious awareness.
Even more evidence against the separation of reason and emotion came from behavioral economics. The work of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky in the late 1970s challenged rational choice models of decision making with bounded rationality. Individuals make shortcuts to decision making called heuristics, rules of thumb. Humans are cognitive misers, meaning they economize their own expenditure of reasoning and available data to patterns of thinking which are familiar. A common heuristic is availability: a preference for information readily available is preferred to what isn't. Heuristics are essentially intuitive and not rational and yet are a regular part of mental functioning.
Haidt's own moral theory from such research is that moral reasoning begins with intuition and reason comes second. His metaphor is of a rider on an elephant, the conscious yielding to the dictates of the unconscious. Haidt's model is the closest to the philosopher David Hume who said reason is slave to the passions. Before advances in cognitive science the disagreements between the philosophers continued on for centuries, but with all the aforementioned developments Hume won the debate. Now it's up to moral psychologists to build working models of this theory.
Haidt's own intitutive model of the mind gives six foundations for moral values, in addition to harm and fairness. These are:
1. Care/harm
2. Fairness/cheating
3. Loyalty/betrayal
4. Authority/subversion
5. Sanctity/degradation
6. Liberty/oppression
Foundations 3-5 are inherently social values as distinct from 1 and 2. The first two are directly related to group authority and and not the individual. Foundation 6 was added to account for the uniqueness of libertarians, and is an inherently political value.
Conservatives score relatively evenly on all six foundations. Liberals score higher on care and fairness and less on the other foundations than conservatives. Libertarians score like conservatives on care and fairness, more like liberals on loyalty, authority, and purity, and higher on liberty than conservatives or liberals.
What Haidt's foundations suggest is that conservatism is the default mindset of most societies. Our moral existence is tied to our social existence rather than the more rational and universal values of care and fairness, which owe to our childhood dependency (care) and basic social existence (fairness) which we all go through. In the evolutionary past, it would have been adaptive to prefer those which serve the ingroup and those which serve an outgroup. Those who are more like us and follow the rules are going to help you and those who are different or outsiders could harm you.
Haidt's theory also means that conservatives are more able to understand liberal psychology than liberals are able to understand conservatives. Liberals have fewer dominant moral foundations. This doesn't bode well for our political discourse, as from the conservative perspective liberals are far more intolerant of conservative opinions than vice versa, especially when they have institutional power.
In the United States a plurality of voters since 1988 have described themselves as conservative, 40%. 20% describe themselves as liberal and most of the rest are somewhere in the middle. This doesn't always translate into conservative victory however. A majority of voters in exit polls in 2012 said they felt ideologically closer to Mitt Romney than Barack Obama, yet liberal Barack Obama won the popular vote. Other factors are at play, though it's safe to say most ideological conservatives vote Republican and most ideological liberals vote Democratic. What confounds psychological disposition is identity. Around 80-90% of black voters have voted for the Democratic Party since 1964. It isn't as if they are all psychologically liberal. Republicans have been confounded for decades in that much of the minority population holds conservative views on certain social issues but vote overwhelmingly Democrat. This is I think the limitation of the moral foundations theory, as politics in a democratic society confounds many of our expectations about human nature. Republicans are overwhelmingly self identified conservatives, as conservatives are more conscious of their ingroup identity, whereas liberals are only a plurality of Democrats.
Libertarians are pretty interesting in that they seem to operate on fewer moral foundations than liberals or conservatives. Libertarians seem to be the most tolerant in their view of what constitutes right and wrong but are also more narrow. This explains their view that government shouldn't do much else than protect individual's right to their own property, even if it isn't fair or it offends others. Paradoxically, libertarianism would work best in a society in which everybody is a libertarian, which would preclude a lot if not most people who would have to put up with what they see as wrong or evil. That's a hard bargain for a social and hierarchical species. That would require a "higher" and more limited level of moral reasoning than the foundations suggest.
In the final part of the book Haidt ventures outside of psychology into evolutionary theory to explain the process of how moral foundations came to be. This is the most contentious part of the book. Haidt defends group selection as the mechanism for moral sentiments. Haidt's metaphor is that humans are 90% chimpanzee and 10% bee. Moral foundations were adaptive to advance our own group versus others, and more moral groups won out. If this is true then the moral and social order are intertwined on a biological level.
The reigning view of Neo-Darwinism is of inclusive fitness: the gene is the level of selection which individual organisms exist to promote and altruism occurs toward kin who share genes and reciprocally to benefit oneself in return. Most mammals including our ape relatives operate with inclusive fitness. Hymenoptera (ants, bees, wasps, termites) are eusocial, truly altruistic, sacrificing their interests for that of the hive. Eusociality is rare even among insects, but when achieved is very successful at least in terms of numbers. Haidt argues that humans have aspects of true altruism which are how moral sentiments evolved, not as unconscious motivations for the interest of our genes. Humans are intensely social in a way the apes aren't and have shared intentionality. Intelligence itself evolved to live in extended social groups some have argued.
There are I think two limits to this: 1) humans evolved in small groups of relatives with coercive altruism and 2) unlike hymenoptera we do not limit reproduction to a single queen or alpha pair. We are not as altruistic towards other people as we are towards our family or those who benefit us. Communism doesn't work well on a larger level than a commune of devoted (often religious) followers while markets have created a system of global economic integration based on self-interest. Group selection is a factor but I don't think is sufficient. Morality is a meme: a unit of evolution which can evolve, adapt, outcompete other memes and reproduce itself, all on a collective level, but it isn't itself biological. Moral memes are driven deep down by selfish genes. This doesn't mean that we don't behave altruistic or don't consciously believe in our ideals, but in a narrow way tailored towards certain interests often hidden to ourselves. We are chimps who try and imagine ourselves to be like bees.
Haidt gives us his own descriptive and normative view of morality: "moral systems are interlocking sets of values, virtues, norms, practices, identities, institutions, technologies, and evolved psychological mechanisms that work together to suppress or regulate self interest and make cooperative societies possible." He calls this "Durkheimian utilitarianism" which calls for a social order based on all the moral foundations, considering both the social nature of morality and the rationality of moral rules. Whatever works best, given the constraints of the social order. This definition is supposed to combine conservatism and liberalism, tradition and reason. This is I think very much an ideal view as people are going to believe in certain moral memes above others given their differences, and so content matters. We are social but essentially tribal and so its operation is going to be more than what "works" or is agreeable for all people. We have to make choices on moral memes which serve our own purposes, a view which identifies me as a conservative. And so to me Haidt's consilience between liberals and conservatives means he's a liberal.
I accept Haidt's moral psychology and I'm led to a pessimistic but I think realist conclusion regarding the book. Morality is rooted in intuitions from our physical makeup and evolutionary history which reason is the servant to. Because of this, the particular moral, cultural, religious and political memes we are attracted to are shaped by unconscious forces which may not be in our best interests. We can adopt memes which run counter to our individual natures, but we will face great difficulty. Though we promote honesty, fidelity, and nonviolence, nevertheless we do lie, cheat, and harm others if in our interests, conscious or not. Nevertheless we should respect the moral views of others as being due to personal differences and not intellectual defects. We should heed the words of Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene: "let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish." Quite a conservative view.
Another conclusion from Haidt's moral foundations is that the cultural Marxist meme that right wing political views are the result of an "authoritarian personality" is false. Conservatives simply have more or different moral concerns than liberals do, which are also oriented, consciously or not, towards the good of the group. Conservative individuals aren't selfish or unempathetic but put different values above or alongside care and fairness. The same goes for libertarians who value liberty very highly. It is left-liberals I expect that will be the most troubled by Haidt's moral psychology and he seems to have written it for them. Haidt unfortunately has come under vicious attack from cultural Marxists for being politically incorrect regarding the censorship of unpopular political views.
Wednesday, August 17, 2016
Darwin: Portrait of a Genius by Paul Johnson
A serviceable biography of Darwin the man and his ideas. However Johnson has an ideological agenda. Johnson is a conservative Catholic who surprisingly to me accepts the theory of evolution, part of the reason I picked up this book other than that I'm a fan of his historical writings. Johnson really does think Darwin the man is a genius, and tells us about his good character and intellectual prowess. But even though he accepts evolution, he is very uncomfortable about drawing any implications from natural selection about the universe or human nature. He sharply criticizes the new atheists for critiquing religion and aiming to explain its origin through natural selection itself. Given all of that, those looking for a short basic biography of Darwin will be pleased but should be aware of Johnson's ulterior motives.
The source of Johnson's discomfort with natural selection is with Robert Malthus whom Johnson devoted several pages to attacking. This is odd because it was the population theory of Malthus, that population has a tendency unchecked to outgrow subsistence and eventually decrease to subsistence, that inspired both Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace to come up with natural selection independently. As Darwin wrote "Multiply, vary, let the strongest live and the weakest die" which accords with the drive towards more population being selected into different levels of stability by the environment. It was Malthus who probably more than anyone else suggested a plausible mechanism to Darwin and Wallace that would answer how the transmutation of species occurred, as the idea of evolution had been around for a while but without such a plausible mechanism as natural selection.
Johnson's first problem with Malthus is that he didn't have much data in his essay on population. This is in contrast to Darwin who did volumes of research on barnacles and coral reefs before publishing his theory. But Malthus wrote his book for political reasons against radicals who thought want could be eliminated through a reordering of society. In 1798 the radical phase of the French Revolution was fresh in memory. Edmund Burke penned his Reflections on the Revolution in France at this time and founded modern Anglo conservatism, for much the same reasons as Malthus. As for the population principle, the reasoning behind it was mathematical. Population increases unchecked at a geometric rate and food at an arithmetic rate. The Fibonacci number sequence 1,1,2,3,5,8,13,21 in which every number is the sum of the previous two numbers was originally proposed by Fibonacci as rabbit breeding. If a pair of rabbits give birth to another m/f pair and that pair itself gives birth the next generation, how many rabbits will there be in a year? 1,1,2,3,5,8,13,21,34,55,89,144: a geometric increase. This assumes perfect conditions of no deaths and every pair being male and female but the math works out. As for subsistence, the amount of arable land is limited and requires subsistence to be paid to to cultivate it, which as population increases gives diminishing returns. Luckily advances in technology and farming techniques have increased productivity, but hundreds of millions remain in extreme poverty and consumption is highly unequal. Malthus did not predict imminent catastrophe as population could be controlled by preventing births, sometimes through coercive means like China's one child policy, and unfortunate conditions which keep up the death rate. World population has gone from under a billion in Malthus' day to 7 billion at the beginning of the 21st century, with the continuing increase coming from the third world as consumption has increased in the first, so the data was forthcoming.
Johnson's other beef with Malthus is that his thinking inspires social Darwinism and eugenics which used natural selection as justification. Malthus' theory is directly aimed at human society by giving a link between biology and social policy. Darwin is excoriated by Johnson for his Descent of Man which engages in some social Darwinian thinking. Darwin wasn't as good an anthropologist as biologist Johnson argues and worried about human population, such as opposing mass vaccination for disease to keep the population down. Darwin however didn't support contraception which would also keep the population down, reflecting his own Victorian views. Application of evolution to society before modern genetics often led to wrong conclusions, but social Darwinism was based more on Lamarckian evolution by acquired characteristics which is individualistic than natural selection by the environment. After all "social Darwinists" like Herbert Spencer who coined survival of the fittest wrote about evolution before the Origin of Species. Even eugenics which was pioneered by Darwin's cousin Francis Galton was more about population statistics rather than biology. So Johnson's worry about the application of natural selection to society is mostly historical.
Nevertheless there are conclusions that Darwinism can draw about human nature and society which are scientifically sound. This has been the work of the sociobiologists and those inspired by them who come in different political stripes: Peter Singer on the left, EO Wilson on the liberal side, Matt Ridley on the libertarian side, and Thomas Fleming who is a Catholic paleoconservative. Marxists used to be champions of Darwinism, such as Joseph Stalin who upon reading The Descent of Man as a seminary boy became an atheist. However when Stalin became dictator of the USSR he suppressed genetic research which suggested evolution to be less progressive for the communist cause. than he wanted. Grounding ideology on Darwinism gives it a very different perspective, but nonetheless different interpretations have been done, usually highlighting certain aspects above others. Malthus himself inspired stricter poor laws in the nineteenth century, but also environmentalists in the twentieth.
As for religion, Darwin's theories do weaken its claims and religious faith, as it did for Darwin himself. What Darwin's theories did was to restrict the domain of what religion could explain. The Copernican theory of heliocentrism did that to the Catholic Church in physics, Thomas Lyell's geology did it to the biblical age of the Earth calculated by Bishop Ussher, and Darwin's natural selection did it to human to human origins in Genesis. Johnson's own Catholicism merged Christianity with classical philosophy, and the challenge the latter has weakened the former. If religion continues, it will be for transcendental questions which science can't yet explain or ever will, such as the existence of God or the afterlife. We shouldn't fear Darwin in the humanities and social sciences because we thought those up, often from secular thinkers like Aristotle whom the Catholic church relied upon. We no longer invoke religion to the conduct of physics because it isn't necessary and the scientific method has given us better results than human reasoning from dogma. Good and bad ideas will still survive.
The source of Johnson's discomfort with natural selection is with Robert Malthus whom Johnson devoted several pages to attacking. This is odd because it was the population theory of Malthus, that population has a tendency unchecked to outgrow subsistence and eventually decrease to subsistence, that inspired both Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace to come up with natural selection independently. As Darwin wrote "Multiply, vary, let the strongest live and the weakest die" which accords with the drive towards more population being selected into different levels of stability by the environment. It was Malthus who probably more than anyone else suggested a plausible mechanism to Darwin and Wallace that would answer how the transmutation of species occurred, as the idea of evolution had been around for a while but without such a plausible mechanism as natural selection.
Johnson's first problem with Malthus is that he didn't have much data in his essay on population. This is in contrast to Darwin who did volumes of research on barnacles and coral reefs before publishing his theory. But Malthus wrote his book for political reasons against radicals who thought want could be eliminated through a reordering of society. In 1798 the radical phase of the French Revolution was fresh in memory. Edmund Burke penned his Reflections on the Revolution in France at this time and founded modern Anglo conservatism, for much the same reasons as Malthus. As for the population principle, the reasoning behind it was mathematical. Population increases unchecked at a geometric rate and food at an arithmetic rate. The Fibonacci number sequence 1,1,2,3,5,8,13,21 in which every number is the sum of the previous two numbers was originally proposed by Fibonacci as rabbit breeding. If a pair of rabbits give birth to another m/f pair and that pair itself gives birth the next generation, how many rabbits will there be in a year? 1,1,2,3,5,8,13,21,34,55,89,144: a geometric increase. This assumes perfect conditions of no deaths and every pair being male and female but the math works out. As for subsistence, the amount of arable land is limited and requires subsistence to be paid to to cultivate it, which as population increases gives diminishing returns. Luckily advances in technology and farming techniques have increased productivity, but hundreds of millions remain in extreme poverty and consumption is highly unequal. Malthus did not predict imminent catastrophe as population could be controlled by preventing births, sometimes through coercive means like China's one child policy, and unfortunate conditions which keep up the death rate. World population has gone from under a billion in Malthus' day to 7 billion at the beginning of the 21st century, with the continuing increase coming from the third world as consumption has increased in the first, so the data was forthcoming.
Johnson's other beef with Malthus is that his thinking inspires social Darwinism and eugenics which used natural selection as justification. Malthus' theory is directly aimed at human society by giving a link between biology and social policy. Darwin is excoriated by Johnson for his Descent of Man which engages in some social Darwinian thinking. Darwin wasn't as good an anthropologist as biologist Johnson argues and worried about human population, such as opposing mass vaccination for disease to keep the population down. Darwin however didn't support contraception which would also keep the population down, reflecting his own Victorian views. Application of evolution to society before modern genetics often led to wrong conclusions, but social Darwinism was based more on Lamarckian evolution by acquired characteristics which is individualistic than natural selection by the environment. After all "social Darwinists" like Herbert Spencer who coined survival of the fittest wrote about evolution before the Origin of Species. Even eugenics which was pioneered by Darwin's cousin Francis Galton was more about population statistics rather than biology. So Johnson's worry about the application of natural selection to society is mostly historical.
Nevertheless there are conclusions that Darwinism can draw about human nature and society which are scientifically sound. This has been the work of the sociobiologists and those inspired by them who come in different political stripes: Peter Singer on the left, EO Wilson on the liberal side, Matt Ridley on the libertarian side, and Thomas Fleming who is a Catholic paleoconservative. Marxists used to be champions of Darwinism, such as Joseph Stalin who upon reading The Descent of Man as a seminary boy became an atheist. However when Stalin became dictator of the USSR he suppressed genetic research which suggested evolution to be less progressive for the communist cause. than he wanted. Grounding ideology on Darwinism gives it a very different perspective, but nonetheless different interpretations have been done, usually highlighting certain aspects above others. Malthus himself inspired stricter poor laws in the nineteenth century, but also environmentalists in the twentieth.
As for religion, Darwin's theories do weaken its claims and religious faith, as it did for Darwin himself. What Darwin's theories did was to restrict the domain of what religion could explain. The Copernican theory of heliocentrism did that to the Catholic Church in physics, Thomas Lyell's geology did it to the biblical age of the Earth calculated by Bishop Ussher, and Darwin's natural selection did it to human to human origins in Genesis. Johnson's own Catholicism merged Christianity with classical philosophy, and the challenge the latter has weakened the former. If religion continues, it will be for transcendental questions which science can't yet explain or ever will, such as the existence of God or the afterlife. We shouldn't fear Darwin in the humanities and social sciences because we thought those up, often from secular thinkers like Aristotle whom the Catholic church relied upon. We no longer invoke religion to the conduct of physics because it isn't necessary and the scientific method has given us better results than human reasoning from dogma. Good and bad ideas will still survive.
Sunday, August 14, 2016
Moses and Monotheism
Moses and Monotheism was Freud's last book before he died in 1939. Freud claims that Moses was actually an Egyptian who brought the monotheistic sun worship of Akhenaton to the Hebrew slaves after the fall of the eighteenth dynasty and the restoration of the old Egyptian pagan religion. Monotheism then is the invention of the priest class of ancient Egypt. The specific God of the Jewish people Yahweh is adopted from aspects of a volcanic God worshiped by Semitic peoples the Hebrews reunited with. This occurred after Freud claims Moses was murdered by his own people while they were in the desert, a claim which is central to the book. The murder of Moses became the defining event of the Jewish religion. Through guilt for this repressed event, Moses became the central figure of the Yahweh religion and was adopted as Hebrew by birth, rather than Egyptian. Additionally the idea of the messiah promised a return of the murdered savior. The adoption of monotheism shaped Jewish culture away from worship of God in anthropomorphic or animist forms and led to a unique culture.
The evidence marshaled for this revision of history is mostly historical, with insights from Freud's own psychoanalytic theory.
Egypt did have a monotheistic sun god religion under Akhenaton in the 14th century BCE, and the exodus did occur during the eighteenth dynasty, though the dates don't coincide from official interpretations. Nevertheless given how along ago the event was, it is possible. The lack of an afterlife in early Judaism is also shared with the Egyptian religion. Osiris the ruler of the underworld was omitted as it undermined the rule of a single deity.
A major piece of evidence, given Freud's preoccupation with the phallus and castration, is that of the Jewish tradition of circumcision, which the Egyptians did first and he argues was carried over by Moses and his monotheistic religion. The Babylonians and Semites he points out weren't circumcised. Circumcision for Freud is a sign of being the children of Egyptian religion and adds to the sense of being a chosen people, who alone continued Egyptian monotheism.
Moses' name Freud claims is Egyptian, coming from mose which means child. This is in contrast to the mainstream interpretation that Moses is Hebrew for "drawn from the water." However it was an Egyptian princess who supposedly discovered Moses in the Nile, and it is unlikely she would have a knowledge of Hebrew for such a specific name, making the story mythical. This story is very similar to that of Sargon the founder of Babylon 2800 BC who was also put in a basket by his mother into a river to be discovered by Akki, the drawer of water (Genesis and Exodus was probably written after the Jews were taken to Babylon. A parallel of Noah's ark is also found in the Epic of Gilgamesh). Founding patriarchs like Romulus and Cyrus usually have incredible legends attached to them. So rather than being of Hebrew birth, Moses was born into Egyptian nobility.
The claim that Yahweh is patterned on a volcanic God is still held by some atheists today. Moses supposedly came in contact with this religion while in exile at Qades after killing an Egyptian who he witnessed beating a Hebrew slave. While there he married the daughter of Jethro, a Midian priest and spoke to Yahweh alone at the burning bush. When the Hebrews left Egypt and reunited with the other Semitic people's they adopted aspects of the volcanic God with the Egyptian God. The imagery of a pillar of fire by night and pillar of smoke by day leading them through the desert speaks to volcanic activity. There aren't any active volcanoes in the Sinai however, so it would have been imported from somewhere else, making the argument speculative.
The claim that Moses was murdered by his people in exile came from biblical scholar Ernst Sellin who found indirect evidence in scripture, but it is mostly speculation. Moses died without entering the promised land, though he was allowed to peer at it. His death was at the hands of God. Apparently the reason Moses wasn't to enter the promised land was that he disobeyed God's order to speak to a rock to deliver water, and instead hit it with his staff. "Because you did not believe in me, to uphold me as holy in the eyes of the people of Israel, therefore you shall not bring this assembly into the land that I have given them” (Numbers 20:8-12). He was 120 years old, but still in good health. It is not known where Moses' body is buried, so we don't know the cause of death.
The reason for Moses' murder would be that the Semitic people were tired of the strict monotheism foisted on them from Egypt and would prefer to reunite with the other Semitic people and their volcanic religion. The worship of the idol when Moses received the Ten Commandments was a sign of this fatigue of a strict religion. The bible says that the 40 years in the desert was due to a lack of faith that they could conquer the people living in Canaan. God planned on wiping them out, but upon intervention by Moses instead decided that none of this doubting generation would be allowed into the promised land. After forty years they all died in exile. As the first generation died off he would have less support and more resentment from the young from having to live under harsh conditions.
The murder of Moses would have been forgotten except among the literate priest class. A distortion of his death, the circumstances which are unusual, would allow Moses' memory to be preserved among the population as the liberator or the Jewish people from bondage and lawgiver. At some point the Semitic Yahweh would become the God of the Aton religion and so its and Moses' origins would be concealed. This would make the only God of monotheism belong to a single people, rather than being universal.
The murder of Moses by his people on the desert is central to Freud's larger theory of the murder of the primordial father as the origin of religion, which takes up a good portion of the book. For Freud the power of religion could only be due to neurosis from the traumatic event of the murder of the father to keep reoccurring throughout myths and art, just as neurotics cannot get over past trauma and engage in repetitive irrational behaviors. Back in our evolutionary history, humans lived in a polygamous horde headed by an alpha male who had exclusive access to females. Freud got this from remarks of Darwin about gorillas who live in such a social structure. One day, the sons including those in exile and castrated joined together and murdered the father. Though freed from oppressive rule, they felt tremendous remorse for the act and the lack of a single authority figure. And so religion was established from the longing for the father though without his actual existence. Presumably every boy grows up with this hatred of the father due to this evolutionary heritage, and so the conflict is born again and again to be socialized away. Nevertheless these feelings power the need for religion and manifest in different ways.
Judaism is unique because it claimed God had a chosen people, who defined the religion by their adherence to moral principles and not by graven images. Freud claims that this allowed the Jews to repress the aggression and remorse which inspire external wish fulfillment and instead advance culturally and intellectually. This is also what made monotheism a mass religion instead of an elite one as in Egypt, as the transcendent God of monotheism is an intellectual advance to the pagan gods.
Christianity which is not tied to a single ethnic group brings back the repressed memory of the death of the father and offers individual salvation. Christianity originated the doctrine of original sin and made confrontation with the repressed necessary. Because of this Freud thinks Christianity is regressive but potentially progressive if the repressed can be dealt with properly. Islam is mentioned only briefly, as a less profound imitation of Judaism. Gaining an all powerful God inspired self-confidence and great successes for the Arab people given the rapidity of its spread. But Islam came to be in recent history and lacks the mystery of its own origins (Judaism) or the centrality of the death of its founder (Christianity).
Freud was an atheist as well as ethnically Jewish, so maybe his purpose in writing this book was to exonerate Jews as an ethnic group from a religion he argues originated as an imposition from another people under impulses which govern us all. Freud was not a Zionist but was sensitive towards the treatment of Jewish people in Europe. The Vienna of his time saw rising anti-Semitism by the end of the century which closed off the opportunities hoped for with liberal political rule after the revolutions of 1848. Freud intensely disliked the Catholic Church and the Hapsburg monarchy, refusing to toff his hat to the emperor while at university. The church was the successor to the Roman Empire which destroyed the Jewish temple and defeated the Semitic Hannibal in the Punic war (Freud himself thought he was fated to never see Rome like Hannibal). It had been the feudal successors to Rome which oppressed the Jews and resisted the scientific revolution and the enlightenment. The French Revolution freed Jews from the ghettos and the conquests of Napoleon spread enlightenment ideals to Central Europe. Freud thought of his ideas as continuing what Copernicus and Darwin had done to undermine the medieval worldview. Through his psychological theories, Freud hoped to replace religion with a scientific human nature which would justify a social order based on reason, in fulfillment of the enlightenment.
Unfortunately Freud had to flee Vienna at the end of his life when Hitler invaded Austria and spent his last days in Britain, whose freedom raised the hopes of Voltaire for a new social order. Several of Freud's relatives died in concentration camps. The year World War II began, Freud died of a doctor assisted suicide of morphine injection. Had he lived, he would have seen great destruction in Europe but also the fall of fascism and the tremendous impact of his ideas.
The evidence marshaled for this revision of history is mostly historical, with insights from Freud's own psychoanalytic theory.
Egypt did have a monotheistic sun god religion under Akhenaton in the 14th century BCE, and the exodus did occur during the eighteenth dynasty, though the dates don't coincide from official interpretations. Nevertheless given how along ago the event was, it is possible. The lack of an afterlife in early Judaism is also shared with the Egyptian religion. Osiris the ruler of the underworld was omitted as it undermined the rule of a single deity.
A major piece of evidence, given Freud's preoccupation with the phallus and castration, is that of the Jewish tradition of circumcision, which the Egyptians did first and he argues was carried over by Moses and his monotheistic religion. The Babylonians and Semites he points out weren't circumcised. Circumcision for Freud is a sign of being the children of Egyptian religion and adds to the sense of being a chosen people, who alone continued Egyptian monotheism.
Moses' name Freud claims is Egyptian, coming from mose which means child. This is in contrast to the mainstream interpretation that Moses is Hebrew for "drawn from the water." However it was an Egyptian princess who supposedly discovered Moses in the Nile, and it is unlikely she would have a knowledge of Hebrew for such a specific name, making the story mythical. This story is very similar to that of Sargon the founder of Babylon 2800 BC who was also put in a basket by his mother into a river to be discovered by Akki, the drawer of water (Genesis and Exodus was probably written after the Jews were taken to Babylon. A parallel of Noah's ark is also found in the Epic of Gilgamesh). Founding patriarchs like Romulus and Cyrus usually have incredible legends attached to them. So rather than being of Hebrew birth, Moses was born into Egyptian nobility.
The claim that Yahweh is patterned on a volcanic God is still held by some atheists today. Moses supposedly came in contact with this religion while in exile at Qades after killing an Egyptian who he witnessed beating a Hebrew slave. While there he married the daughter of Jethro, a Midian priest and spoke to Yahweh alone at the burning bush. When the Hebrews left Egypt and reunited with the other Semitic people's they adopted aspects of the volcanic God with the Egyptian God. The imagery of a pillar of fire by night and pillar of smoke by day leading them through the desert speaks to volcanic activity. There aren't any active volcanoes in the Sinai however, so it would have been imported from somewhere else, making the argument speculative.
The claim that Moses was murdered by his people in exile came from biblical scholar Ernst Sellin who found indirect evidence in scripture, but it is mostly speculation. Moses died without entering the promised land, though he was allowed to peer at it. His death was at the hands of God. Apparently the reason Moses wasn't to enter the promised land was that he disobeyed God's order to speak to a rock to deliver water, and instead hit it with his staff. "Because you did not believe in me, to uphold me as holy in the eyes of the people of Israel, therefore you shall not bring this assembly into the land that I have given them” (Numbers 20:8-12). He was 120 years old, but still in good health. It is not known where Moses' body is buried, so we don't know the cause of death.
The reason for Moses' murder would be that the Semitic people were tired of the strict monotheism foisted on them from Egypt and would prefer to reunite with the other Semitic people and their volcanic religion. The worship of the idol when Moses received the Ten Commandments was a sign of this fatigue of a strict religion. The bible says that the 40 years in the desert was due to a lack of faith that they could conquer the people living in Canaan. God planned on wiping them out, but upon intervention by Moses instead decided that none of this doubting generation would be allowed into the promised land. After forty years they all died in exile. As the first generation died off he would have less support and more resentment from the young from having to live under harsh conditions.
The murder of Moses would have been forgotten except among the literate priest class. A distortion of his death, the circumstances which are unusual, would allow Moses' memory to be preserved among the population as the liberator or the Jewish people from bondage and lawgiver. At some point the Semitic Yahweh would become the God of the Aton religion and so its and Moses' origins would be concealed. This would make the only God of monotheism belong to a single people, rather than being universal.
The murder of Moses by his people on the desert is central to Freud's larger theory of the murder of the primordial father as the origin of religion, which takes up a good portion of the book. For Freud the power of religion could only be due to neurosis from the traumatic event of the murder of the father to keep reoccurring throughout myths and art, just as neurotics cannot get over past trauma and engage in repetitive irrational behaviors. Back in our evolutionary history, humans lived in a polygamous horde headed by an alpha male who had exclusive access to females. Freud got this from remarks of Darwin about gorillas who live in such a social structure. One day, the sons including those in exile and castrated joined together and murdered the father. Though freed from oppressive rule, they felt tremendous remorse for the act and the lack of a single authority figure. And so religion was established from the longing for the father though without his actual existence. Presumably every boy grows up with this hatred of the father due to this evolutionary heritage, and so the conflict is born again and again to be socialized away. Nevertheless these feelings power the need for religion and manifest in different ways.
Judaism is unique because it claimed God had a chosen people, who defined the religion by their adherence to moral principles and not by graven images. Freud claims that this allowed the Jews to repress the aggression and remorse which inspire external wish fulfillment and instead advance culturally and intellectually. This is also what made monotheism a mass religion instead of an elite one as in Egypt, as the transcendent God of monotheism is an intellectual advance to the pagan gods.
Christianity which is not tied to a single ethnic group brings back the repressed memory of the death of the father and offers individual salvation. Christianity originated the doctrine of original sin and made confrontation with the repressed necessary. Because of this Freud thinks Christianity is regressive but potentially progressive if the repressed can be dealt with properly. Islam is mentioned only briefly, as a less profound imitation of Judaism. Gaining an all powerful God inspired self-confidence and great successes for the Arab people given the rapidity of its spread. But Islam came to be in recent history and lacks the mystery of its own origins (Judaism) or the centrality of the death of its founder (Christianity).
It is helpful to consider Nietzsche's writings on the Jewish religion in comparison to Moses and Monotheism to account for the spread of monotheism. In the Antichrist Nietzsche argues that the Jewish religion was originally essentially a tribal religion reflecting the pride and achievements of their own people, much like Freud's opinion of Islam. This Judaism reflected "master morality." But the subjugation under Rome made the Jews an oppressed, powerless people. The Jewish religion became resentful of power and adopted slave morality, the worship of the poor, the weak, and the oppressed reflecting their own condition. Asceticism, a mark of slave morality, comes naturally from monotheism with its transcendent nature. The monotheist God is incompatible with the pagan pantheon and so could not be assimilated. This incompatibility of values created a division between absolute good and evil removed from the superiority of their own people versus others, and turned into a moralistic creed of slave values masquerading as God's law. That Judaism was originally a tribal religion accords with Freud's account of Yahweh's origin in volcanic god worship. Drawing from the monotheist idea would've justified the repression necessary to impart slave values to former master civilizations like Rome, which Nietzsche talks about in Genealogy of Morals. Monotheism does seem to be an intellectual product of a comfortable ruling/priest class, seen in ancient Egypt and neo-Platonism, and adding slave morality would have made it truly universal and account for its rapid spread.
Monotheism seems to be a combination of the intellect and power of self restraint of the upper class with the morals and lifestyle of the lower class, meant for a universal audience. This is how monotheism took over much of he world.
Freud was an atheist as well as ethnically Jewish, so maybe his purpose in writing this book was to exonerate Jews as an ethnic group from a religion he argues originated as an imposition from another people under impulses which govern us all. Freud was not a Zionist but was sensitive towards the treatment of Jewish people in Europe. The Vienna of his time saw rising anti-Semitism by the end of the century which closed off the opportunities hoped for with liberal political rule after the revolutions of 1848. Freud intensely disliked the Catholic Church and the Hapsburg monarchy, refusing to toff his hat to the emperor while at university. The church was the successor to the Roman Empire which destroyed the Jewish temple and defeated the Semitic Hannibal in the Punic war (Freud himself thought he was fated to never see Rome like Hannibal). It had been the feudal successors to Rome which oppressed the Jews and resisted the scientific revolution and the enlightenment. The French Revolution freed Jews from the ghettos and the conquests of Napoleon spread enlightenment ideals to Central Europe. Freud thought of his ideas as continuing what Copernicus and Darwin had done to undermine the medieval worldview. Through his psychological theories, Freud hoped to replace religion with a scientific human nature which would justify a social order based on reason, in fulfillment of the enlightenment.
Unfortunately Freud had to flee Vienna at the end of his life when Hitler invaded Austria and spent his last days in Britain, whose freedom raised the hopes of Voltaire for a new social order. Several of Freud's relatives died in concentration camps. The year World War II began, Freud died of a doctor assisted suicide of morphine injection. Had he lived, he would have seen great destruction in Europe but also the fall of fascism and the tremendous impact of his ideas.
Thursday, August 11, 2016
An Essay on the Principle of Population by Robert Malthus
Thomas Robert Malthus 1766-1834, who went by his middle name, was an English reverend who taught political economy at the East India Company College until his death. He was a pioneer of economics during its early years, but is best remembered for his population theory. Malthus wrote An Essay on the Principle of Population in 1798 in response to utopians like William Godwin, against whom the essay was written, who thought that the world could be rid of scarcity with a radical reordering of society, such as was attempted during the radical phase of the French Revolution. Condorcet the philosophe, also discussed in the essay, was ironically was put to death by radicals during the French Revolution while writing about the perfectibility of man.
Malthus' arguments if true are "conclusive against the perfectibility of the mass of mankind." Malthus' argument against the perfectibility of mankind is based on two postulates: "food is necessary to the existence of man" and "the passion between the sexes is necessary and will remain nearly in its present state." The latter force is greater than the former which faces inherent limits. There must be a strive toward more population for it made sense to have as many offspring as possible in the hope some survive, given the high rate of death for most of history. The survival of offspring however is limited by the food supply which keeps down the population. (From such reasoning Darwin and Wallace independently developed natural selection after reading Malthus).
Population has a tendency when unchecked to outstrip the means to sustain it; this is Malthus' famous population principle.
Malthus' defense of the population principle is mathematical: "Population, when unchecked, increases at a geometrical ratio. Subsistence increases only in an arithmetical ratio." If every couple reproduces at the replacement rate of two and their offspring do likewise the next generation, then the population will go 2,4,8,16,32,64,128,256,512 and so on. Of course this assumes no deaths, every couple has a boy and a girl, and some incest. Nevertheless the math checks out. Malthus' principle works much like the Fibonacci sequence in which each successive number is the addition of the two previous numbers: 1,1,2,3,5,8,13,21,34,55. Fibonacci's own example was breeding pairs of rabbits, so I wouldn't be surprised if that is where Malthus got his principle.
Subsistence or simply food grows arithmetically: 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9. This is for two reasons: the availability of fertile land and the cost of the subsistence of labor. Only 30% of Earth's surface is land, and only a portion of that can be used for agriculture, less than 40%, given deserts and tundra. Population cannot grow more than the space for it and cannot be sustained more than arable land can provide for. Food in massive quantities must also be cultivated which means paying people from increased production. Each additional unit of food has the cost of using more land, feeding more mouths, and paying more laborers, so increases are only arithmetic.
Malthus' relation of population to subsistence tends towards disequilibrium in the short term. As Keynes (who was influenced by Malthus) said in the long run we are all dead, as will be the surplus population, but in the short term we strive to get all we can and reproduce as much we desire to.
Malthus named two checks to population growth which have prevented catastrophe: positive and preventative checks. Positive checks are disease, famine, war, infanticide, extreme poverty, and malnutrition which restrict population growth by increasing the death rate. Preventative checks are birth control, celibacy, abstinence and vices like prostitution which decrease the birth rate. Positive checks tend to operate unfortunately on the lower classes and preventative checks are used by the upper class. The former Malthus called misery and the latter vice, as the preventative checks limited birth outside the confines of marriage and by non-procreative sex. Malthus as a cleric preferred the virtue of self control, but nonetheless positive and preventative checks have worked in keeping the population down.
In Malthus' time population was beginning to grow rapidly. The world population of Malthus' time was under a billion. It took three hundred before that for the world population to double from 1500 to 1800. The population doubled again in 1927 to 2 billion, doubled again in 1974 to 4 billion in the 1970s, and is set to double again by the 2020s to 8 billion.
Malthus predicted that unchecked the world population would double every generation, 25 years. If this happened the world population would be around 48 billion instead of 7 billion at the early 21st century. This is taken by critics as disproving Malthus. But Malthus didn't conclude that population collapse was inevitable, given checks and ability to increase the food supply. His principle just like the Fibonacci sequence is under unchecked ideal conditions. Luckily innovations in agriculture such as mechanization and the "green revolution" of the late 20th century in Asia have grown the food supply. Nevertheless hundreds of millions of people still live in poverty and face malnutrition. Population is still checked positively and preventatively, sometimes by coercive measures such as the one child policy by China which has only recently been changed. Even without drastic measures birth rates have declined over time due to family planning and education which accompany industrialization. Even so, because people are living longer the population grows from a larger base which as it grows wealthier consumes more, and so we face a similar problem regarding subsistence.
Malthus' principle was meant to disprove the existence of an ideal society under ideal conditions in which there is continual growth of the food supply, nobody died, and food was equally available. What would happen is that everybody would want more food and produce more mouths to feed than the land can provide. Even if people restricted the children they had preventatively, a higher standard of living for all would eat up the increases in subsistence and reduce the population and/or standard of living. Private property would be required to ensure a higher standard of living for some and not for others who would be less well off. Those who don't own land or the means of production would enter into the service of those who do as slaves, serfs, or proletarians. Property would be defended from the have nots by a state paid by wealth extracted from the bulk of population, and so we're out of the anarcho-communist utopia of bread, land, and peace.
"And thus it appears, that a society constituted according to the most beautiful form that imagination can conceive, with benevolence for its moving principle, instead of self-love, and with every evil disposition in all its members corrected by reason and not force, would, from the inevitable laws of nature, and not from any original depravity of man, in a very short period degenerate into a society constructed upon a plan not essentially different from that which prevails in every known state at present; I mean, a society divided into a class of proprietors, and a class of labourers, and with self-love the main-spring of the great machine."
Malthus' principle does not assume that humans are wicked and selfish which feed such institutions, but that structural conditions put into place diminishing returns from increases in wealth which lead to unequal allocation of resources.
As an economist Malthus was concerned with the relation of such scarcity to economic policy. Wages can't be more than subsistence in the long run as population would increase and then there would more laborers looking for work competing for the higher wages, which altogether both will decrease subsistence and lower wages back down. This is the iron law of wages which Malthus thought of and was elaborated by David Ricardo. It is a direct consequence of the population principle. Given the unalterable scarcity of the Earth, attempts to increase living conditions for the mass of mankind by government will not work in the long run.
Malthus' economic policy would be much like Adam Smith's of freeing the hand of government and allowing supply and demand to regulate prices and wages. The other main proposal of his was to reform the poor laws to require work and uncomfortable conditions to receive aid, which should not be so much as to discourage work and more mouths to feed. Upon reading the essay William Pitt the Younger shelved a bill expanding poor relief and later the poor laws were amended in 1834 to Malthus' recommendations of work and uncomfortable conditions.
At the end of the essay Malthus implores us to not despair at this unfortunate condition of human existence. "Evil exists in the world not to create despair but activity. We are not patiently to submit to it, but to exert ourselves to avoid it." If there were nothing to struggle against, there would be no motive to improve or purpose to progress towards. Such checks exist to push us towards industry and virtue which if cultivated can secure a good life. God is not a nasty being, but one which puts inherent checks on our ambitious designs.
There is reason for cheer for those living in the twentieth first century. The market economics championed by Smith and Malthus have succeeded in reducing extreme poverty from over 90% of the world population in the early 19th century to about 15% by the beginning of the 21st century. Progress was slow over the 19th century, but has increased in tandem with greater economic freedom. Population growth rates have also slowed under industrialization, and a new problem for developed countries is keeping population at replacement. Zero population growth doesn't mean below replacement in the long run, given longer lifespans fewer children per couple could be better.. The Cold War was won by capitalism which opened up Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia. Great progress has been made from the state controlled economies, but there is much to be done. Capitalism generates greater inequality within nations and unequal resource consumption between nations. The US is 5% of the world population but consumes a quarter of its resources. 12% of the world’s population lives in North America and Western Europe and accounts for 60% of consumption, while the third of the world living in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa accounts for only 3.2%. Meanwhile the population increases have been mostly in the third world which has less means to support itself. This is a different problem than improving the worst off, and so proponents of the free market should be wary of utopian stirrings.
Malthus is one of those figures in history who is both popular and unpopular at the same time. His ideas are very influential and well known, but not well liked despite their truth. In this Malthus joins Machiavelli, Hobbes, Darwin, and Nietzsche whose isms are associated with nasty ideas which nevertheless have great truth to them. This is to be expected as Malthus set out to disprove the excessive optimism of the enlightenment which sought a radical reordering of society. Among his greatest critics were Marx, Engels, and Lenin whose ideas of the perfectibility of society in application caused great misery in the twentieth century (along with agricultural disasters). A strong dose of pessimism is needed from time to time to save ourselves.
"To prevent the recurrence of misery, is, alas! beyond the power of man. In the vain endeavour to attain what in the nature of things is impossible, we now sacrifice not only possible but certain benefits. We tell the common people that if they will submit to a code of tyrannical regulations, they shall never be in want. They do submit to these regulations. They perform their part of the contract, but we do not, nay cannot, perform ours, and thus the poor sacrifice the valuable blessing of liberty and receive nothing that can be called an equivalent in return."
How prescient.
Monday, August 8, 2016
Psychosexual Development and Human Evolution
Central to the parallel between Sigmund Freud's psychosexual stages and evolutionary history is the recapitulation of ancestral stages early in life. Ernst Haeckel's biogenetic law described the relation as ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, the development of the individual repeats their evolutionary history. Haeckel 's version of recapitulation is considered to be a special case as it specifically referred to adult traits of evolutionary ancestors being recapitulated, but the concept of heterochrony allows for changing in the timing or rate of events for different stages of development, such as neoteny which extends youthful traits into adulthood.
Prior to to Sigmund Freud's five psychosexual stages of oral, anal, phallic, latent, and genital there is birth and birth trauma. Life in the womb parallels the life of our ancestors in the ocean Sandor Ferenczi hypothesized and I've written on length about. The moment of birth is the parallel of the first vertebrates to transition to life on land away from the sea which had to be adapted to, much as newborns must learn to breathe on their own.
Freud's early psychosexual stages the oral and anal stages are rooted in mammalian and the transition from quadruped mammalian existence. Freud hypothesized that humans evolved from a quadruped mammalian ancestor which was more reliant on the sense of smell and matured sexually around age five, without a latency period.
The oral stage up to age 1 is of dependency on the mother after birth for sustenance, something all mammals share but is prolonged with humans who take longer to mature, to walk. The fundamental need for others others develops as well as the need to be independent due to external conditions leads to a lifelong conflict between the pleasure principle and the reality principle.
The anal stage age 1 to 3 in which potty training occurs has its phylogenetic parallel with the beginnings of a mastery of a bipedal stature away from the ground and away from the dominance of smell to the dominance of vision, something related to our primate existence as tree dwellers swinging from branches looking for ripe fruit in a three dimensional environment. The need to control defecation is really the ability to revert to a posture closer to the ground and its smells and then be able to get back up again.We learn to control the defecation of feces, hiding them, so we can get up and have them free from view.
Freud began this line of speculation about bipedalism in a letter to Wilhelm Fliess in 1897:
"the notion was linked to the changed part played by sensations of smell: upright walking, nose raised from the ground, at the same time a number of formerly interesting sensations attached to the earth becoming repulsive...The outcome, however, is not a release of libido but of an unpleasure, and eternal sensation analogous to disgust in the case of an object."
The evolutionary historical parallel of the period of sexual latency is the ice age. Sandor Ferenczi the Hungarian psychoanalyst made a connection between Freud's psychosexual stage of latency and the last ice age.
"Having ventured so far beyond the knowable, we have no reason to shrink before the last analogy and from bringing the last great step into individual repression, the latency period, into connection with the last and greatest catastrophe that smote our primate ancestors...,i.e. with the misery of the glacial period, which we faithfully recapitulate in our individual life." Sandor Ferenczi, Stages in the Development of the Sense of Reality 1913, found in Freud: Biologist of the Mind 1977
Freud himself mentioned the theory in The Ego and the Id 1923.
"According to one psychoanalytic hypothesis [by Ferenczi], the last mentioned phenomenon, which seems to be peculiar to man, is a heritage of the cultural development necessitated by the glacial epoch. We see, then, that the differentiation of the superego from the ego is no matter of chance"
The latency period makes psychosexual development "diphasic", that is separated into pre-genital and genital phases. Only an historical catastrophe would separate both. Since the preconditions for society developed during the ice age, the agent of social morality the superego also developed then.
When the climate changed and the Earth warmed, Homo Sapiens Sapiens emerged as the one successful hominid having resolved the Oedipal conflict through a new social consciousness to secure cooperation. The interglacial epoch could be a parallel for the genital stage after latency when the external world can be understood and become a source of happiness instead of difficulty. The genital stage is when sexual contact ventures outside the family, in reproductive terms towards the other sex, much as civilization transcends the social bonds of immediate kinship.
A new social consciousness the genital phase with the control of fire, which was a repression of the autoerotic and homoerotic sexual instinct, to augment same-sex social identification. When in the sight of natural fires, the men would put the fire out with a stream of urine, perhaps sharing in the act. This pleasure belongs to the men and is a source of genital pleasure not linked to women. One day a man renounced the autoerotic and homosexual pleasure of putting out fire with urine and took the fire back to the women and with this invention outcompeted the other men for the love of the women. The nature of fire gave benefit to the entire community and so was not overcome by resentment. So a few men would repress, that is sublimate, their sexual urges into the mastery of nature by labor and so would achieve a higher status than his fellow men among women, achieving a new form of social identity: economic. This sublimation of labor got us through the ice age.
"It is as though primal man had the habit, when he came into contact with fire, of satisfying the infantile desire connected with it, by putting it out with a stream of his urine...The first person to renounce this desire and spare the fire was able to carry it off with him and subdue it to his own use. By damping down the fire of his own sexual excitation, he had tamed the natural force of fire. This great cultural conquest was thus the reward for his renunciation of instinct. Further, it is as though woman had been appointed guardian of the fire which was held captive on the domestic hearth, because her anatomy made it impossible for her to yield to the temptation of this desire. It is remarkable, too, how regularly analytic experience testifies to the connection between ambition, fire, and urethral eroticism." Freud footnote to Civilization and its Discontents 1929
Prior to to Sigmund Freud's five psychosexual stages of oral, anal, phallic, latent, and genital there is birth and birth trauma. Life in the womb parallels the life of our ancestors in the ocean Sandor Ferenczi hypothesized and I've written on length about. The moment of birth is the parallel of the first vertebrates to transition to life on land away from the sea which had to be adapted to, much as newborns must learn to breathe on their own.
Freud's early psychosexual stages the oral and anal stages are rooted in mammalian and the transition from quadruped mammalian existence. Freud hypothesized that humans evolved from a quadruped mammalian ancestor which was more reliant on the sense of smell and matured sexually around age five, without a latency period.
The oral stage up to age 1 is of dependency on the mother after birth for sustenance, something all mammals share but is prolonged with humans who take longer to mature, to walk. The fundamental need for others others develops as well as the need to be independent due to external conditions leads to a lifelong conflict between the pleasure principle and the reality principle.
The anal stage age 1 to 3 in which potty training occurs has its phylogenetic parallel with the beginnings of a mastery of a bipedal stature away from the ground and away from the dominance of smell to the dominance of vision, something related to our primate existence as tree dwellers swinging from branches looking for ripe fruit in a three dimensional environment. The need to control defecation is really the ability to revert to a posture closer to the ground and its smells and then be able to get back up again.We learn to control the defecation of feces, hiding them, so we can get up and have them free from view.
Freud began this line of speculation about bipedalism in a letter to Wilhelm Fliess in 1897:
"the notion was linked to the changed part played by sensations of smell: upright walking, nose raised from the ground, at the same time a number of formerly interesting sensations attached to the earth becoming repulsive...The outcome, however, is not a release of libido but of an unpleasure, and eternal sensation analogous to disgust in the case of an object."
The oral and anal stages are followed by the phallic Oedipal stage of conflict and identification I described as paralleling the end of the alpha ape dominance hierarchy with greater male investment/cooperation due to hunting meat, which completed the transition from ape to human 5-2 million years ago as the climate began to cool down from the Pliocene to the Pleistocene:
"Our transition to hunting ape was perfected during the ice age, marking our transition from ape society. Colder temperatures began back in the Pliocene 5 to 2 millions of years ago when the trees began to disappear, forcing our ancestors to adapt to life on foot in the savanna. As the climate got colder and trees fewer, having a diet of some meat would have been adaptive. Rather than being dependent on nature, we could take the prerogative of finding our own food. Eating meat along with cooking it shaped our complex social organization, sharing food and greater parental investment in young, and enabled a big brain, providing lots of energy and decreasing our jaw size relative to the nut and fruit eating primates.
"This change to hunting precipitated a social change from primate society, away from a dominance hierarchy with an alpha male on top to one with more equality between males as well as more investment in offspring. The alpha male had primary access to females, probably taking a few mates for himself. Hunting to the contrary was most likely a cooperative venture of acquisition with primitive tools, against large animals. A system of either sexual promiscuity or serial monogamy guaranteeing individual sexual access would have been more advantageous to male loyalty, and so the alpha ape had to die. During this time, a forced egalitarianism in small groups would develop to ensure the sharing of meat. Attachment to multiple females, by confusing paternity, or a single partner, guaranteeing paternity, would guarantee such paternal investment."
The phallic stage of years 3 to 6 is when the child's own genitalia becomes the dominant erogenous zone. This is the time of the exploration of the body, which results in the realization of anatomical differences between males and females. Boys discovering woman's lack of a penis gives rise to castration anxiety, that the father who maintains sexual access to the mother has the power to remove the penis.
The Oedipus complex occurs when the mother is seen as an object of sexual desire and the father a competitor for the mother's affection. The phylogenetic parallel of the Oedipal conflict is the greater attachment adult males have towards women due to continual sexual receptivity as opposed to seasons of heat and rut, a change beginning with the dominance of sight ensuring regular arousal as opposed to pheromone smell activation. Since adult men stick around, they do compete with children for the mother's attention, and young children can't yet understand the sexual act which seems aggressive. Men are also less attached to offspring than the mother it is argued because of paternity uncertainty: it is certain for the mother to know the children she gave birth to are hers while it isn't as clear to the male. So the conflict with the father, the castration complex, may be a reaction against fears of male infanticide, which does occur in the animal kingdom.
Identification with the father as first an ego ideal and then a superego keeping the ego in line developed during the ice age to help men get over these anxieties and work together. Instead of having a Nietzschean superman of the alpha male keeping the frustrated men in line, the shared individual ideal of the father would with the growth of human consciousness and shared intentionality take over as lawgiver, anthropomorphized into animal or object worship due to the guilt of eliminating the alpha male.
"Darwin deduced from the habits of the higher apes that men, too, originally lived in comparatively small groups or hordes within which the jealousy of the oldest and strongest male prevented sexual promiscuity.
"One day, the brothers who had been driven out, came together, killed and devoured their father and so made an end to the patriarchal horde. United, they had the courage to do and succeeded in doing what would have been impossible for them individually.
"Our transition to hunting ape was perfected during the ice age, marking our transition from ape society. Colder temperatures began back in the Pliocene 5 to 2 millions of years ago when the trees began to disappear, forcing our ancestors to adapt to life on foot in the savanna. As the climate got colder and trees fewer, having a diet of some meat would have been adaptive. Rather than being dependent on nature, we could take the prerogative of finding our own food. Eating meat along with cooking it shaped our complex social organization, sharing food and greater parental investment in young, and enabled a big brain, providing lots of energy and decreasing our jaw size relative to the nut and fruit eating primates.
"This change to hunting precipitated a social change from primate society, away from a dominance hierarchy with an alpha male on top to one with more equality between males as well as more investment in offspring. The alpha male had primary access to females, probably taking a few mates for himself. Hunting to the contrary was most likely a cooperative venture of acquisition with primitive tools, against large animals. A system of either sexual promiscuity or serial monogamy guaranteeing individual sexual access would have been more advantageous to male loyalty, and so the alpha ape had to die. During this time, a forced egalitarianism in small groups would develop to ensure the sharing of meat. Attachment to multiple females, by confusing paternity, or a single partner, guaranteeing paternity, would guarantee such paternal investment."
The phallic stage of years 3 to 6 is when the child's own genitalia becomes the dominant erogenous zone. This is the time of the exploration of the body, which results in the realization of anatomical differences between males and females. Boys discovering woman's lack of a penis gives rise to castration anxiety, that the father who maintains sexual access to the mother has the power to remove the penis.
The Oedipus complex occurs when the mother is seen as an object of sexual desire and the father a competitor for the mother's affection. The phylogenetic parallel of the Oedipal conflict is the greater attachment adult males have towards women due to continual sexual receptivity as opposed to seasons of heat and rut, a change beginning with the dominance of sight ensuring regular arousal as opposed to pheromone smell activation. Since adult men stick around, they do compete with children for the mother's attention, and young children can't yet understand the sexual act which seems aggressive. Men are also less attached to offspring than the mother it is argued because of paternity uncertainty: it is certain for the mother to know the children she gave birth to are hers while it isn't as clear to the male. So the conflict with the father, the castration complex, may be a reaction against fears of male infanticide, which does occur in the animal kingdom.
Identification with the father as first an ego ideal and then a superego keeping the ego in line developed during the ice age to help men get over these anxieties and work together. Instead of having a Nietzschean superman of the alpha male keeping the frustrated men in line, the shared individual ideal of the father would with the growth of human consciousness and shared intentionality take over as lawgiver, anthropomorphized into animal or object worship due to the guilt of eliminating the alpha male.
"Darwin deduced from the habits of the higher apes that men, too, originally lived in comparatively small groups or hordes within which the jealousy of the oldest and strongest male prevented sexual promiscuity.
"One day, the brothers who had been driven out, came together, killed and devoured their father and so made an end to the patriarchal horde. United, they had the courage to do and succeeded in doing what would have been impossible for them individually.
"What had up to then been prevented by his actual existence was thenceforward prohibited by the sons themselves"
-Freud Totem and Taboo 1913
This brings us to the latency stage. Latency is the period after age 5 or 6 and before puberty, around age 12-13. Sexual identification has already occurred during the previous genital stage. During this period sexual urges are held back and the child is able to make social relationships with fellow children of the same sex and through education take in the morals of adults, fully developing a superego. The sexual instinct is chilled during this cool off period so we can live together.
This brings us to the latency stage. Latency is the period after age 5 or 6 and before puberty, around age 12-13. Sexual identification has already occurred during the previous genital stage. During this period sexual urges are held back and the child is able to make social relationships with fellow children of the same sex and through education take in the morals of adults, fully developing a superego. The sexual instinct is chilled during this cool off period so we can live together.
The evolutionary historical parallel of the period of sexual latency is the ice age. Sandor Ferenczi the Hungarian psychoanalyst made a connection between Freud's psychosexual stage of latency and the last ice age.
"Having ventured so far beyond the knowable, we have no reason to shrink before the last analogy and from bringing the last great step into individual repression, the latency period, into connection with the last and greatest catastrophe that smote our primate ancestors...,i.e. with the misery of the glacial period, which we faithfully recapitulate in our individual life." Sandor Ferenczi, Stages in the Development of the Sense of Reality 1913, found in Freud: Biologist of the Mind 1977
Freud himself mentioned the theory in The Ego and the Id 1923.
"According to one psychoanalytic hypothesis [by Ferenczi], the last mentioned phenomenon, which seems to be peculiar to man, is a heritage of the cultural development necessitated by the glacial epoch. We see, then, that the differentiation of the superego from the ego is no matter of chance"
The latency period makes psychosexual development "diphasic", that is separated into pre-genital and genital phases. Only an historical catastrophe would separate both. Since the preconditions for society developed during the ice age, the agent of social morality the superego also developed then.
When the climate changed and the Earth warmed, Homo Sapiens Sapiens emerged as the one successful hominid having resolved the Oedipal conflict through a new social consciousness to secure cooperation. The interglacial epoch could be a parallel for the genital stage after latency when the external world can be understood and become a source of happiness instead of difficulty. The genital stage is when sexual contact ventures outside the family, in reproductive terms towards the other sex, much as civilization transcends the social bonds of immediate kinship.
A new social consciousness the genital phase with the control of fire, which was a repression of the autoerotic and homoerotic sexual instinct, to augment same-sex social identification. When in the sight of natural fires, the men would put the fire out with a stream of urine, perhaps sharing in the act. This pleasure belongs to the men and is a source of genital pleasure not linked to women. One day a man renounced the autoerotic and homosexual pleasure of putting out fire with urine and took the fire back to the women and with this invention outcompeted the other men for the love of the women. The nature of fire gave benefit to the entire community and so was not overcome by resentment. So a few men would repress, that is sublimate, their sexual urges into the mastery of nature by labor and so would achieve a higher status than his fellow men among women, achieving a new form of social identity: economic. This sublimation of labor got us through the ice age.
Sunday, August 7, 2016
Latter Day Wittgenstein
Ludwig Wittgenstein in his posthumous Philosophical Investigations 1953 criticized both the notion of language as merely naming objects or sense data and the notion of a purely private consciousness. Language isn't just ostention, which is every word standing for some object which the mind makes a picture of. The meaning of language is in how it is used. The meaning of a word presupposes how it is used. Thinking of the definition of games, there isn't one definition of game which would perfectly fit everything we consider a game, from chess to duck duck goose. According to Wittgenstein this doesn't matter since we use the word without having an ideal definition. Others understand what we are talking about when we talk about game in a given situation. For Wittgenstein meaning is intended to be social, for another person. There is no purely private language.
Wittgenstein's view is notably different than Plato's presented in Socrates' dialogues. Socrates criticizes those who think they know what something is without being able to provide an account or elaborate their knowledge of what it is. In the Socratic dialectic, a definition for something like justice is given and from a series of questions it is determined if there are contradictions in that definition which will lead to a better definition or at least dismiss the definition at hand. This for Wittgenstein would just be a language game. Wittgenstein encouraged students to do other things than philosophy since he saw it as having to do with language which people can understand without philosophy. I think this is the sad state philosophy got itself in when it became separated from the sciences as its own discipline. Certainly the use of language is very important when trying to answer answerable questions, the reason why Latin a dead language is still used in naming species. And so I don't read much philosophy past the early 20th century and instead learn from popular science writers.
Wittgenstein's view is notably different than Plato's presented in Socrates' dialogues. Socrates criticizes those who think they know what something is without being able to provide an account or elaborate their knowledge of what it is. In the Socratic dialectic, a definition for something like justice is given and from a series of questions it is determined if there are contradictions in that definition which will lead to a better definition or at least dismiss the definition at hand. This for Wittgenstein would just be a language game. Wittgenstein encouraged students to do other things than philosophy since he saw it as having to do with language which people can understand without philosophy. I think this is the sad state philosophy got itself in when it became separated from the sciences as its own discipline. Certainly the use of language is very important when trying to answer answerable questions, the reason why Latin a dead language is still used in naming species. And so I don't read much philosophy past the early 20th century and instead learn from popular science writers.
The Eye is the Measure of the Man
"The eye is the measure of the man"
The lyric in David Byrne's song Home by David Byrne & Brian Eno in the film Wall Street: Movie Never Sleeps brings to mind two quotations. One is "the eye is the window of the soul" attributed to Renaissance patron Lorenzo de Medici, which means something like the eyes reflect our inner nature, as well as what our eyes seek reflects our nature. The other quote is "man is the measure of all things" attributed to Protagoras, a sophist in Socrates' day who subscribed to philosophical relativism, what is true for an individual's perception is true for them and only them. In Byrne and Eno's lyric man the individual takes the place of a transcendent soul. Wall Street is a movie all about perception having the power in financial capitalism to move money and power. Gordon Gekko presents himself as a father figure to Shia LaBeouf's character Jake wanting to reconnect with his daughter Winnie, and ends up using him to take his Winnie's sizable inheritance away. Gekko after taking back his place on Wall Street does give back money to Jake and Winnie and they live together as a family. Gekko doesn't change his nature after years in prison, but upon seeing the ultrasound of his grandson has a change of heart, after making his money of course. The message of the movie is somewhat cynical, people don't really change but under appearances can live together. The eye is the measure of the man means that who we are is constituted, indeed satisfied, with appearances.
The Ludovico Treatment
The ludovico treatment in A Clockwork Orange always fascinated me for one reason above others; how bad do people have to be for society to abolish the fundamental instinct for self preservation?
The ludovico treatment is a kind of aversion therapy in which an individual is strapped in a chair with their eyes kept open and forced to watch a series of violent images while being injected with a drug inducing disgust and nausea at strong levels. The individual is supposed to be conditioned to be repulsed by violence so much that they would forgo acting on their aggressive urges rather than feel the sickness come on.
Alex the main character is sent to prison after the murder of an older woman alone in her home and for two years does not change. He still enjoys violence and aggressive sexuality, but reads the Old Testament to get his jollies instead. He sublimates his desires in a socially acceptable way, and seemingly engages in a reaction formation, of doing the opposite of violence which is quietly reading, exchanging the image for the word. Alex learns of the ludovico treatment through thrown away newspaper clippings and guard talk and wants to volunteer for the radical new treatment. The treatment is being pushed by the current government as a less costly and more humane means of reducing crime than imprisonment. Alex gleefully volunteers for the treatment since it prevent him from serving his full term.
The treatment however backfires. Inadvertently during one of the sessions, Ludwig Van Beethoven's ninth symphony is playing in the background and becomes conditioned with the repulsion. Alex loves Beethoven so this is an omen of what is to come. When Alex comes back home he finds that his room has been rented to a lodger who has become close to his parents. When he tries to react in anger against the gentleman who is an asshole he feels the sickness come on and nearly collapses to the floor while gasping for air. Even the lodger thinks this is humiliating, even if deserved for what Alex did. Alex can't even express anger in the indirect ways of displacement, hitting a table for instance, or projection. The very instinct of aggression is turned inward with no escape but to renounce it. Later he is attacked by a group of homeless men after he is recognized as beating up on of them with his gang of Droogs, and is helpless to defend himself. Two police officers arrived to break it up, and they are none other than two of his former gang who aren't happy to see each other, but they are aware of Alex's treatment. So for revenge on past grievances, they torture Alex in the woods by drowning him in a tub of water while beating him with a club. Alex is in cuffs and they are police so he gets a double dose of the old style of punishment and the ludovico treatment.
Alex finds his way to a solitary home of a paraplegic who invites him in. The man is actually the victim of an attack by Alex's gang which paralyzed him and raped his wife which led to her death. He is willing to help Alex because he is a critic of the government, but Alex accidentally reveals himself by singing in the bathtub the tune he sang on the night of the raid, singin' in the rain. The man locks Alex up in a room upstairs while playing Beethoven's 9th symphony and Alex jumps from the window in a suicide attempt. He is unable to forgive Alex.
Alex survives the fall and his story becomes a news sensation of how the government destroyed a young man's will to live in the attempt to cure him. The treatment is reversed and Alex goes back to his old ways. "I was cured alright."
What the government took away from Alex was more than the instinct of self preservation. They also took away substitutes for aggression learned from social life. The problem with these substitutes like sublimation, displacement, reaction formation is that they are still fueled by some sort of aggression, we can't do what we really want to do so we channel those feelings into other actions. But those activities are precisely what have made civilization possible and contribute to the creation and enjoyment of certain culture and entertainment. Alex without these is less of a human. Taking away his animal nature has meant taking away some of his human nature. A Clockwork Orange visualizes the absurdity of compelling individuals to act altruistically to advance society. Government has to resort to denial of the will to live to accomplish this. His fellow Droogs don't act altruistically and still benefit socially compared to Alex, making the development of self denial not advantageous since not everybody has the ludovico treatment. A Clockwork Orange is a commentary on the liberal welfare state which aims to correct social ills by means of regulation and spending to influence outcomes.
Anthony Burgess wrote A Clockwork Orange in 1962 with the theories of psychologist BF Skinner in mind, which justifes attempts at social engineering. Skinner was a proponent of behaviorism, the theory that psychology should concern itself with observable behavior, which is a pattern of stimulus-response, and not internal mental states. Rather than reforming people with punishment to make them see the error of their ways, we should instead alter behavior by altering the consequences of behavior. When someone does what we want, we should reinforce it with reward. When someone does something unfavorable, we remove what has been given to negatively reinforce behavior. This way Skinner argued is more humane than punishment and blame. Rather than expect people to believe the right thing, we ought just to alter the incentives shaping their behavior. Skinner came out with Beyond Freedom and Dignity in 1971 which argued for doing away with the social obsession with free will and dignity as they can only be ascribed to a "homunculus", little man inside of us, and not behavior which is relevant. An over emphasis on freedom and dignity Skinner thought justified punishment and blame, as we assume people are responsible for everything they do. Freedom and dignity are really an aversion to punishment and not autonomous man.
There is little question that the ludovico treatment is based on behaviorist aversion therapy: negative reinforcement of aggression by association of behavior with negative stimuli. Alex's treatment consists not in him doing the aggressive behaviors but observing others doing them on screen. This reflects the social learning theory, sometimes called neo-behaviorism, of Albert Bandura. Bandura's famous bobo doll experiment showed a recording of an adult hitting a clown doll to children and compared their activity in a room with their own clown doll. The group which saw the adult hitting the doll on video also hit the doll compared to the control group. This suggested that violence in media can inspire violence in real life. After the film adaptation came out in 1971, there were several violent incidents patterned after the film.
The ending of A Clockwork Orange was changed in the edition Americans read. The book had 21 chapters, a traditional age of manhood, which ended with Alex renouncing his evil ways without the ludovico treatment, of his own accord. Kubrick also cut out that ending in the film adaptation, thinking that American audiences would never go for it. Without the ending, which worked better in the book than it probably would've in the movie, what we're left with is the Christian view of man with original sin and the burden of free will without absolution. And Burgess was a Catholic after all.
Stanley Kubrick was not a Christian and was either an atheist or at least didn't believe in a personal god. Kubrick made A Clockwork Orange in 1971 when Darwinian accounts of human society were entering into the mainstream which validated the darker aspects of the Christian view of man. This context I think gave A Clockwork Orange a new social meaning. For a long time even after Darwin, social scientists and anthropologists thought that humans were different from animals and shaped primarily by culture. By the 1960s several influential books like The Naked Ape by Desmond Morris 1967 and The Territorial Imperative 1966 by Robert Ardrey, who influenced Kubrick directly, appeared which posited that millions of years of natural selection aren't transformed by a few generations of social engineering. Civilization comprises about 5% of the existence of our species, compared to 95% of our species' existence being spent in a very different environment with different needs. This environment Ardrey and Morris argued shaped our nature by forcing us to begin eating and eventually hunting meat due to the disappearance of the forests and the colder weather starting with the Pliocene. Man evolved to be a killer ape. By the 1970s a new paradigm of Darwinian thinking popularized by Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene 1976 put the gene as the unit of selection, not the group, and argued that altruism operates according to helping those related to you (kin selection) or helping others so they help you and your genes (reciprocal altruism). Individuals do help others not to advance themselves, but ultimately their genes. The different ending of his film affirmed this new view.
The ludovico treatment is a kind of aversion therapy in which an individual is strapped in a chair with their eyes kept open and forced to watch a series of violent images while being injected with a drug inducing disgust and nausea at strong levels. The individual is supposed to be conditioned to be repulsed by violence so much that they would forgo acting on their aggressive urges rather than feel the sickness come on.
Alex the main character is sent to prison after the murder of an older woman alone in her home and for two years does not change. He still enjoys violence and aggressive sexuality, but reads the Old Testament to get his jollies instead. He sublimates his desires in a socially acceptable way, and seemingly engages in a reaction formation, of doing the opposite of violence which is quietly reading, exchanging the image for the word. Alex learns of the ludovico treatment through thrown away newspaper clippings and guard talk and wants to volunteer for the radical new treatment. The treatment is being pushed by the current government as a less costly and more humane means of reducing crime than imprisonment. Alex gleefully volunteers for the treatment since it prevent him from serving his full term.
The treatment however backfires. Inadvertently during one of the sessions, Ludwig Van Beethoven's ninth symphony is playing in the background and becomes conditioned with the repulsion. Alex loves Beethoven so this is an omen of what is to come. When Alex comes back home he finds that his room has been rented to a lodger who has become close to his parents. When he tries to react in anger against the gentleman who is an asshole he feels the sickness come on and nearly collapses to the floor while gasping for air. Even the lodger thinks this is humiliating, even if deserved for what Alex did. Alex can't even express anger in the indirect ways of displacement, hitting a table for instance, or projection. The very instinct of aggression is turned inward with no escape but to renounce it. Later he is attacked by a group of homeless men after he is recognized as beating up on of them with his gang of Droogs, and is helpless to defend himself. Two police officers arrived to break it up, and they are none other than two of his former gang who aren't happy to see each other, but they are aware of Alex's treatment. So for revenge on past grievances, they torture Alex in the woods by drowning him in a tub of water while beating him with a club. Alex is in cuffs and they are police so he gets a double dose of the old style of punishment and the ludovico treatment.
Alex finds his way to a solitary home of a paraplegic who invites him in. The man is actually the victim of an attack by Alex's gang which paralyzed him and raped his wife which led to her death. He is willing to help Alex because he is a critic of the government, but Alex accidentally reveals himself by singing in the bathtub the tune he sang on the night of the raid, singin' in the rain. The man locks Alex up in a room upstairs while playing Beethoven's 9th symphony and Alex jumps from the window in a suicide attempt. He is unable to forgive Alex.
Alex survives the fall and his story becomes a news sensation of how the government destroyed a young man's will to live in the attempt to cure him. The treatment is reversed and Alex goes back to his old ways. "I was cured alright."
What the government took away from Alex was more than the instinct of self preservation. They also took away substitutes for aggression learned from social life. The problem with these substitutes like sublimation, displacement, reaction formation is that they are still fueled by some sort of aggression, we can't do what we really want to do so we channel those feelings into other actions. But those activities are precisely what have made civilization possible and contribute to the creation and enjoyment of certain culture and entertainment. Alex without these is less of a human. Taking away his animal nature has meant taking away some of his human nature. A Clockwork Orange visualizes the absurdity of compelling individuals to act altruistically to advance society. Government has to resort to denial of the will to live to accomplish this. His fellow Droogs don't act altruistically and still benefit socially compared to Alex, making the development of self denial not advantageous since not everybody has the ludovico treatment. A Clockwork Orange is a commentary on the liberal welfare state which aims to correct social ills by means of regulation and spending to influence outcomes.
Anthony Burgess wrote A Clockwork Orange in 1962 with the theories of psychologist BF Skinner in mind, which justifes attempts at social engineering. Skinner was a proponent of behaviorism, the theory that psychology should concern itself with observable behavior, which is a pattern of stimulus-response, and not internal mental states. Rather than reforming people with punishment to make them see the error of their ways, we should instead alter behavior by altering the consequences of behavior. When someone does what we want, we should reinforce it with reward. When someone does something unfavorable, we remove what has been given to negatively reinforce behavior. This way Skinner argued is more humane than punishment and blame. Rather than expect people to believe the right thing, we ought just to alter the incentives shaping their behavior. Skinner came out with Beyond Freedom and Dignity in 1971 which argued for doing away with the social obsession with free will and dignity as they can only be ascribed to a "homunculus", little man inside of us, and not behavior which is relevant. An over emphasis on freedom and dignity Skinner thought justified punishment and blame, as we assume people are responsible for everything they do. Freedom and dignity are really an aversion to punishment and not autonomous man.
There is little question that the ludovico treatment is based on behaviorist aversion therapy: negative reinforcement of aggression by association of behavior with negative stimuli. Alex's treatment consists not in him doing the aggressive behaviors but observing others doing them on screen. This reflects the social learning theory, sometimes called neo-behaviorism, of Albert Bandura. Bandura's famous bobo doll experiment showed a recording of an adult hitting a clown doll to children and compared their activity in a room with their own clown doll. The group which saw the adult hitting the doll on video also hit the doll compared to the control group. This suggested that violence in media can inspire violence in real life. After the film adaptation came out in 1971, there were several violent incidents patterned after the film.
The ending of A Clockwork Orange was changed in the edition Americans read. The book had 21 chapters, a traditional age of manhood, which ended with Alex renouncing his evil ways without the ludovico treatment, of his own accord. Kubrick also cut out that ending in the film adaptation, thinking that American audiences would never go for it. Without the ending, which worked better in the book than it probably would've in the movie, what we're left with is the Christian view of man with original sin and the burden of free will without absolution. And Burgess was a Catholic after all.
Stanley Kubrick was not a Christian and was either an atheist or at least didn't believe in a personal god. Kubrick made A Clockwork Orange in 1971 when Darwinian accounts of human society were entering into the mainstream which validated the darker aspects of the Christian view of man. This context I think gave A Clockwork Orange a new social meaning. For a long time even after Darwin, social scientists and anthropologists thought that humans were different from animals and shaped primarily by culture. By the 1960s several influential books like The Naked Ape by Desmond Morris 1967 and The Territorial Imperative 1966 by Robert Ardrey, who influenced Kubrick directly, appeared which posited that millions of years of natural selection aren't transformed by a few generations of social engineering. Civilization comprises about 5% of the existence of our species, compared to 95% of our species' existence being spent in a very different environment with different needs. This environment Ardrey and Morris argued shaped our nature by forcing us to begin eating and eventually hunting meat due to the disappearance of the forests and the colder weather starting with the Pliocene. Man evolved to be a killer ape. By the 1970s a new paradigm of Darwinian thinking popularized by Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene 1976 put the gene as the unit of selection, not the group, and argued that altruism operates according to helping those related to you (kin selection) or helping others so they help you and your genes (reciprocal altruism). Individuals do help others not to advance themselves, but ultimately their genes. The different ending of his film affirmed this new view.
So the answer to my question is that society can't abolish the instinct for self-preservation, and there isn't a limit to how bad our nature allows us to be. The thought that you could do so was based on faulty assumptions of human nature.
Saturday, August 6, 2016
Conservative Realism
Last semester I TA'd for a radical quasi-Marxist professor who taught political science 100 from a Marxian political-economic perspective. And I didn't agree with it one bit. My vision of civics, which is what I think POSC 100 should be, is that it's ultimately up to the individual to be a responsible educated citizen, controlling the things that are in their power. And if we all do this, then the nation will be okay.
Which is why the college kids were puzzled that I'm fascinated by politics yet I'm not into activism or Bernie Sanders type railing against the system. It's cause I still believe in small-r republican virtue, I suppose.
I much agree with statements made by Adam Corolla in an interview that no matter who is president, the federal government is not gonna clean up the sh*t in your backyard or take your kids to school.
"It’s like, what do you mean you can’t? Just go do — go clean the shit out of your back yard. What does that have to do with the federal government? I didn’t even know what she’s talking about.
“The government’s leaving your family behind? You’re supposed to take care of your family. The thing is get the taxes under control and let the people take care of their kids."
“There’s no such thing as a level playing field. It’s, I would say, mathematically impossible to create a level playing field and I’ll tell you why,"
“I went to the same school and had the same opportunity and education as the kids who didn’t. I had friends who went to Stanford, but they had parents and their parents cared and they forced them to do homework and we ran like wild homeless chickens with their heads cut off. And that’s what the difference was,”
“The problem with the government is they can create North Hollywood High and they can staff North Hollywood High, but they can’t follow me home and force my parents to get their shit together so I can do homework."
He was talking specifically about politicians like Elizabeth Warren who's solution is to give sh*t away for free and blame others for their situation in life. As Barack Obama said in a revealing moment "you didn't build that." Such reasoning assumes that people don't deserve the success they've got or the circumstances they find themselves in. In the age of genetics with the human genome sequenced this is becoming increasingly naive, and the value of social capital demonstrates that civil society outside of government is a major determinant of success, which government can't just legislate into existence without taking away liberty. Which might be the point unfortunately.
It's quite sad, but some people actually like this self-defeating attitude. Probably because they're predisposed to it, influenced by genes and social capital I guess. I saw a poll in the news that said 60% of college students supported Sanders, which isn't surprising given college is for many a deferment from actually doing something in life, on grants and subsidized loans of course. They're hearing from college courses what they're probably disposed to hear.
The teacher was a nice guy and luckily comes from an economic or more objective point of view than the social constructivists/postmodernists, the lowest one can sink intellectually. But the class was almost a prime example of college indoctrination. He said that that he's critical of democrats and republicans, but that's not being truly critical I think, only on a superficial level. Right wing ideas aren't given much of a fair shake, a defining trait of those committed to fairness ironically. For example, blaming the Flint situation on corporate greed/power whereas it seems to be a failure of state government.
Repeatedly he told the class that he is angry at the political system, something likely shared by much of the student body. I'm inclined towards pessimism but there is an essential difference between that and the anger that motivates those inclined towards the soft socialism of Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. They really think if you get rid of the bad people then everything will be alright. They aren't self-critical whatsoever. They have a ridiculous optimism in government despite their professed negativity towards how its being run. Why they want to give it even more power, under the right people of course.
For example, Robert Reich's defense of the 15 trillion price tag for Medicare-for-all is it will bring down healthcare costs like in Europe. Which is absurdly optimistic. Single payer did poorly in Sanders' own Vermont and a lot of European countries don't exactly have a single payer system but some mix of public and private. Its Britain and Canada which have single payer. But these Sanderistas should learn about path dependency, how hard it is to change an incentive structure which survives just because it has been in use for so long.
I see another reason however to worry about the willingness to grant more state power over our lives: lack of trust. Successful individualism is not based on avarice. An individualistic society involves trusting others to be competent to run their own lives. Individualism is important for democracy because that trust can then be extended to government, where we trust others to be competent to make decisions over us just as they can for themselves. Pericles originally made this argument in his funeral oration. “The freedom which we enjoy in our government extends also to our ordinary life. There, far from exercising a jealous surveillance over each other, we do not feel called upon to be angry with our neighbour for doing what he likes, or even to indulge in those injurious looks which cannot fail to be offensive, although they inflict no positive penalty.”
As for myself a sense of pessimism, or philosophical realism, informs a sort of self improvement rather than upheaval. One ought not to fixate on conditions which are out of one's control but struggle for one's own salvation. A healthy society should involve the humility and benevolence of accepting that I don't always know what is good for others and trust them to do it themselves. We shouldn't have to pass legislation to inculcate virtue, we should practice it as individual citizens and towards one another.
Which is why the college kids were puzzled that I'm fascinated by politics yet I'm not into activism or Bernie Sanders type railing against the system. It's cause I still believe in small-r republican virtue, I suppose.
I much agree with statements made by Adam Corolla in an interview that no matter who is president, the federal government is not gonna clean up the sh*t in your backyard or take your kids to school.
"It’s like, what do you mean you can’t? Just go do — go clean the shit out of your back yard. What does that have to do with the federal government? I didn’t even know what she’s talking about.
“The government’s leaving your family behind? You’re supposed to take care of your family. The thing is get the taxes under control and let the people take care of their kids."
“There’s no such thing as a level playing field. It’s, I would say, mathematically impossible to create a level playing field and I’ll tell you why,"
“I went to the same school and had the same opportunity and education as the kids who didn’t. I had friends who went to Stanford, but they had parents and their parents cared and they forced them to do homework and we ran like wild homeless chickens with their heads cut off. And that’s what the difference was,”
“The problem with the government is they can create North Hollywood High and they can staff North Hollywood High, but they can’t follow me home and force my parents to get their shit together so I can do homework."
He was talking specifically about politicians like Elizabeth Warren who's solution is to give sh*t away for free and blame others for their situation in life. As Barack Obama said in a revealing moment "you didn't build that." Such reasoning assumes that people don't deserve the success they've got or the circumstances they find themselves in. In the age of genetics with the human genome sequenced this is becoming increasingly naive, and the value of social capital demonstrates that civil society outside of government is a major determinant of success, which government can't just legislate into existence without taking away liberty. Which might be the point unfortunately.
It's quite sad, but some people actually like this self-defeating attitude. Probably because they're predisposed to it, influenced by genes and social capital I guess. I saw a poll in the news that said 60% of college students supported Sanders, which isn't surprising given college is for many a deferment from actually doing something in life, on grants and subsidized loans of course. They're hearing from college courses what they're probably disposed to hear.
The teacher was a nice guy and luckily comes from an economic or more objective point of view than the social constructivists/postmodernists, the lowest one can sink intellectually. But the class was almost a prime example of college indoctrination. He said that that he's critical of democrats and republicans, but that's not being truly critical I think, only on a superficial level. Right wing ideas aren't given much of a fair shake, a defining trait of those committed to fairness ironically. For example, blaming the Flint situation on corporate greed/power whereas it seems to be a failure of state government.
Repeatedly he told the class that he is angry at the political system, something likely shared by much of the student body. I'm inclined towards pessimism but there is an essential difference between that and the anger that motivates those inclined towards the soft socialism of Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. They really think if you get rid of the bad people then everything will be alright. They aren't self-critical whatsoever. They have a ridiculous optimism in government despite their professed negativity towards how its being run. Why they want to give it even more power, under the right people of course.
For example, Robert Reich's defense of the 15 trillion price tag for Medicare-for-all is it will bring down healthcare costs like in Europe. Which is absurdly optimistic. Single payer did poorly in Sanders' own Vermont and a lot of European countries don't exactly have a single payer system but some mix of public and private. Its Britain and Canada which have single payer. But these Sanderistas should learn about path dependency, how hard it is to change an incentive structure which survives just because it has been in use for so long.
I see another reason however to worry about the willingness to grant more state power over our lives: lack of trust. Successful individualism is not based on avarice. An individualistic society involves trusting others to be competent to run their own lives. Individualism is important for democracy because that trust can then be extended to government, where we trust others to be competent to make decisions over us just as they can for themselves. Pericles originally made this argument in his funeral oration. “The freedom which we enjoy in our government extends also to our ordinary life. There, far from exercising a jealous surveillance over each other, we do not feel called upon to be angry with our neighbour for doing what he likes, or even to indulge in those injurious looks which cannot fail to be offensive, although they inflict no positive penalty.”
The same trust extends to the granting of individual rights: "The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg" - Thomas Jefferson. This holds so long as my neighbor trusts I will tolerate his/her beliefs, no picking pockets or breaking legs.
Society has an ongoing tension between individualist and collective moral values, but government isn't so good a moral leader. A society without this mutual trust and values is one where we turn to the coercive judgement of the state to resolve our conflicts. Instead of working things out privately, we sue each other in court. Thus the "road to serfdom" is paved by distrust and disagreement. We find ourselves increasingly bound to the dictates of unelected bureaucrats because we don't trust each other to do what we think they should.
Society has an ongoing tension between individualist and collective moral values, but government isn't so good a moral leader. A society without this mutual trust and values is one where we turn to the coercive judgement of the state to resolve our conflicts. Instead of working things out privately, we sue each other in court. Thus the "road to serfdom" is paved by distrust and disagreement. We find ourselves increasingly bound to the dictates of unelected bureaucrats because we don't trust each other to do what we think they should.
Peeping Tom 1960 Review
This is one my favorite movies, but it is very obscure and has an infamous legacy thanks to film critics at the time. Director Martin Scorsese's presentation of it at a New York film festival in the late 70s is what brought it out of obscurity, which is appropriate because this film was decades ahead of its time. I only found out about it from a brief mention by James Rolfe in his Monster Madness review of Black Christmas. It's rather expensive to buy the criterion edition, and most copies I've seen online are pal. This is why I was so happy to see it for only 5$ on iTunes!
This movie basically ended Michael Powell's career (he directed The Red Shoes) and made Hitchcock very cautious about the release of his Psycho the same year. Apparently this is one of the first English films to have nudity in it, though it's hardly there. In comparison Psycho though controversial is almost silly compared to Peeping Tom. The subject matter is serious and portrays the boyish killer as functioning within society as opposed to Norman Bates.
The film is beautifully shot in full color and set in a modern urban environment which made it too realistic for audiences to write off as just a movie. This is the first film to really use POV filming, a later staple of the slasher genre, further breaking the separation between the audience. We the audience are complicit in everything we see. Mark's motivation and method of killing are very mechanical, a repetition of the destruction of his childhood by the film camera. The most shocking part is that he sits and watches the movies he makes of his victims, which are pure snuff. No production, not even much violence, just fear and death. Mark's relationship to the world is completely artificial, and he can only enjoy the oldest and most powerful of emotions while in dark seclusion.
This is the first depiction I know of snuff films. Super 8 film cameras didn't come out until around 1966, so the only people who would have film equipment would be camera people, like Mark. The movie plot would only be believable if he was a cameraman who was filmed for "scientific" purposes as this was a time before everybody and everything could be filmed.
The plot itself is similar to the short story The Lodger, also an early Hitchcock silent film, in which a single man lives upstairs with a family and has strange habits, coming and going during the night, though in Peeping Tom Mark is actually the landlord rather than the lodger. He starts an awkward relationship with the caring young woman Helen who enters his world oblivious to his personal project. Helen's blind mother on the other hand intuitively knows Mark is up to no good, though she can't see what he does in his room. She is like Tiresias, also blind, from Oedipus Rex who knew who the killer of King Laius is.
There is so much to read from this movie, which was ignored for decades and remains in relative obscurity. Do yourself a favor and watch!
This movie basically ended Michael Powell's career (he directed The Red Shoes) and made Hitchcock very cautious about the release of his Psycho the same year. Apparently this is one of the first English films to have nudity in it, though it's hardly there. In comparison Psycho though controversial is almost silly compared to Peeping Tom. The subject matter is serious and portrays the boyish killer as functioning within society as opposed to Norman Bates.
The film is beautifully shot in full color and set in a modern urban environment which made it too realistic for audiences to write off as just a movie. This is the first film to really use POV filming, a later staple of the slasher genre, further breaking the separation between the audience. We the audience are complicit in everything we see. Mark's motivation and method of killing are very mechanical, a repetition of the destruction of his childhood by the film camera. The most shocking part is that he sits and watches the movies he makes of his victims, which are pure snuff. No production, not even much violence, just fear and death. Mark's relationship to the world is completely artificial, and he can only enjoy the oldest and most powerful of emotions while in dark seclusion.
This is the first depiction I know of snuff films. Super 8 film cameras didn't come out until around 1966, so the only people who would have film equipment would be camera people, like Mark. The movie plot would only be believable if he was a cameraman who was filmed for "scientific" purposes as this was a time before everybody and everything could be filmed.
The plot itself is similar to the short story The Lodger, also an early Hitchcock silent film, in which a single man lives upstairs with a family and has strange habits, coming and going during the night, though in Peeping Tom Mark is actually the landlord rather than the lodger. He starts an awkward relationship with the caring young woman Helen who enters his world oblivious to his personal project. Helen's blind mother on the other hand intuitively knows Mark is up to no good, though she can't see what he does in his room. She is like Tiresias, also blind, from Oedipus Rex who knew who the killer of King Laius is.
There is so much to read from this movie, which was ignored for decades and remains in relative obscurity. Do yourself a favor and watch!
Friday, August 5, 2016
Religious Belief and Self-Deception
(I´ll have to read Darwin´s Cathedral to get more of the group selection explanation of religion which I was introduced to in Jonathan Haidt´s book The Righteous Mind. )
The difference between accepting individual or group selection is very important for the explanation of culture, language, and religion which concern the final chapters. Take religion for instance. Explaining the evolution of religion has been tricky, for how does one explain something scientifically who's claims are either beyond science or simply factually wrong? You need a pretty good error theory to explain religion. Since what makes religion unique is at least fact-transcendent or the worse fact-free, religion must have evolved for purposes other than its truth value. If religion gave us the truth, there wouldn't be such intractable disagreement and dismissal to outright hostility to non-believers.
It is tempting to argue that religion evolved because it contributes to ingroup cohesion, and belief increased fitness because it selected those groups relative to others. Religion does bring people together as well as unite against others, which has been very advantageous in competitive and violent situations. The simplistic phrase there are no atheists in foxholes attests to this. Belief could get individuals to hate others and sacrifice themselves to their group in a way individual interest would not counsel. But if this view is true, then secular peoples/societies should be at a social disadvantage to religious groups. This is a common argument, that without religion society won't function as well. Without God, or as Dostoyevsky actually wrote immortality, everything is permitted.
But as we see secularization is associated with greater economic development and in the first world religion has been slowly retreating. It is a highly debate argument to assert the indirect adaptiveness of religion, which can break down into statistics and interpretation.
The alternative and I think right explanation of religion as well as culture is in individual psychology. It is adaptive to fool ourselves and deny reality as well as fool others. To quote George Costanza, it's not a lie if you believe it. Somehow it benefits individuals to believe in what is contrary to fact or devote themselves to what is beyond usefulness for their self interests. Only the drive of the genes could justify going against ones own reason and interest. It isn't that belief is the cause of indirect benefit to the individual, but that belief is the effect of some sort of individual advantage. Religion disguises selfishness from the individual. Many religions advocate male control of female reproduction which is certainly advantageous to the men to make sure the child is theirs. Women tend to be more religious than men, so the benefit is obvious. Religious belief also instills a confidence about the relation between actions and consequence, that one deserves what one gets.
Nietzsche and Freud formulated this repression hypothesis of religion; individuals lying to themselves to identify the value of other lives with theirs. The notion of religion's, as well as the cultural institution of marriage, role as restrictor of individual sexual activity was noted by Thomas Malthus, himself a reverend. The real question from an evolutionary perspective is how we ever came to value the truth, as our minds didn't evolve to represent reality but for own purposes. This applies to the origin of culture, which usually begins alongside religion. Group selection makes answering these questions easier and more in line with how we think of ourselves. The universal acid of Darwinism, as Daniel Dennett describes it, is that it explains natural phenomena without needing any intentional design behind it, or directly going against what design would bring. Altruistic behavior like complexity in nature does occur, but it isn't for the reasons we think it does, namely that we are consciously generous to one another by inclination.
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